Book Release: Happens Every Day

Isabel Gillies' fallen fairy tale

There are certain girls who we remember from childhood because they seemed to have such charmed, enviable lives. From afar, Isabel Gillies, a former schoolmate of mine, appeared to be one such deity: a gorgeous preteen cover-girl-turned-movie actress (in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan) who then married well and had two beautiful children. I never knew her, but it was impossible to not know of her. So I admit that when I cracked open Happens Every Day (Scribner), Gillies' account of being thrown over by her husband, I anticipated a bit of schadenfreude. Instead, I couldn't help but admire her bravery in exposing the dark side of her seemingly perfect life in such a good-humored, self-effacing way. (It must help that she does so from the distance of a happy second marriage.)

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Writing about getting dumped is a high-wire act: If you overplay the role of victim, the reader gets suspicious. By not denouncing her husband as a total cad even as he sneaks around with a female colleague at Oberlin College, where he teaches, Gillies avoids this trap. And when she gets down on her knees in the snow in front of the other woman and says, "Please, please, I am begging you to end whatever this is," you feel nothing but the deepest sympathy for the fallen golden girl. Her plea falls on deaf ears; the divorce papers get signed, and her ex marries his mistress. If Gillies has a blind spot, it's a certain naïveté about romantic love. "I believe," she writes, "in happy endings." On the other hand, she indeed gets one: just not the one she thought she would.